Mark Thompson has led more than 100 board-level engagements to prepare C-suite successors to step confidently into enterprise leadership. Thompson is ranked the top CEO coach according to Fortune, Thinkers50, and Global Gurus. He is founding chair of the Chief Executive Alliance and the CEO Leadership Plan Review and previously served as CEO of the CEO Academy, a Society of Human Resource Management company in partnership with Wharton and McKinsey.

Earlier in his career, Thompson reported directly to founder Charles “Chuck” Schwab, serving as executive producer of Schwab’s online trading platform, the first large-scale digital platform for online investing. Together, they introduced the world’s first chief customer experience officer role.

Thompson earned a place on Forbes’s Midas List as a founding board member of Esurance and as chair of three companies acquired by Allstate, Hewlett-Packard, and Silicon Labs. He served as a founding advisor to Richard Branson’s entrepreneurship centers and co-founded the Realtime Venture Design Lab at Stanford University, where he completed his master of arts degree. His doctoral dissertation started in the 1990s at the venture lab and will be completed at Purdue University in May 2026.

Thompson has authored more than 300 articles and podcast and videocasts interviews with world business leaders at Chief Executive Alliance. He is also coauthor of Admired: 21 Ways to Double Your Value, a New York Times bestseller; Success Built to Last: Creating a Life That Matters; Now, Build a Great Business; and CEO Ready: What You Need to Know to Earn the Job—and Keep the Job.

He resides in Manhattan near Vanderbilt’s Chelsea campus and in Florida not far from West Palm Beach. Thompson was born and raised near Vanderbilt’s San Francisco campus. He is a Golden visa resident of the United Arab Emirates.